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Delaware Enacts Law Allowing Heirs To Access Digital Assets of Deceased
An anonymous reader writes Ars reports: "Delaware has become the first state in the U.S .to enact a law that ensures families' rights to access the digital assets of loved ones during incapacitation or after death." In other states, the social media accounts and email of people who die also die with them since the companies hosting those accounts are not obligated to transfer access even to the heirs of the deceased. In Delaware, however, this is no longer the case. The article notes that even if the deceased was a resident of another state, if his/her will is governed by Delaware law, his/her heirs will be allowed to avail of the new law and gain access to all digital assets of the deceased.
While this well illustrates another evil of the cloud - the data was never really the living person's, so why would it follow normal law of being passed onto the deceased's estate? - it's nice to see that a responsible government is stepping in to regulate antisocial corporate behaviour.
Unfortunately, in a world so stupid that it accepts a return to the dumb terminals and the mainframes of 40+ years ago, a little bit of foresight is a desalination plant in an ocean of piss.
You could just give them your password.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I don't care much for the social media accounts, but it is good that bought ebooks, music and movies should be accessible to next of kin, just like their physical counterparts are.
Why would I want my porn collection going to my wife? I'd much rather give it to my girlfriend. After all, we bought most of it together.
So transferring digital goods on death is now allowed.
How about when I'm still alive?
oh, wait.
So I read the article and I still don't get how this particularly helps in many, many situations.
Let's assume for a second that a US citizen who ia a Delaware resident and has a will governed by Delaware law has died. How does this provide his/her heirs the ability to:
for example, a) access an account on a database/web forum located solely on a computer in California;
or b) access an account for an online store residing in let's say, Japan or Australia or Argentina?
in example a, the account is located in another state and the owner of the forum/computer as far as I understand it isn't bound by Delaware law. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that in the case of the forum, the website is being hosted by a Californian ISP and there are no out-of-state colos that hold the same account data.
in example b, the account, store, website and ISP hosting the website all reside not only out of Delaware but out of the country.
I truly appreciate what a law like this is trying to achieve. One of my parents passed away a year ago and although it wasn't vital, it certainly would've been handy to be able to have had access to their webmail account. I don't want to sound like I'm discounting the law because it doesn't affect many people, it's just that from my understanding, the law seems either unenforceable and.or toothless.
Anybody who is a lawyer want to chime in?
"Did you earn that gold, or did your dad give it to you?" "Death to bourgeoisie Pandaren!"
They don't even recognize Community Property laws enacted by other states. It is a violation of Blizzard's TOS to let your spouse play using your battle.net account. They want you to purchase an entirely separate account.
They certainly will not recognize digital assets.
And to billy I leave my steam account which has a few good games and a couple hundred games I've never played...
I can now leave my steam account to my son :)
This has interesting implications for the entire industry. Mainly because they'll now need to restructure their systems to deal with moving an asset from one account to another as well as deal with when one user ends up with 2 of the same media. It may seem simple from the outside but if they've never prepared for these problems it could be a major headache for them now.
Not that hard. So lets say my brother has an accident, and leave me his Pink Floyd albums on iTunes.
If I don't have an account already, I simply start using the inherited account. Easy for them. Maybe I want the name changed.
If I already have an account, they can simply give me the albums he had. It is digital stuff, so there is no difference between a "new" instance of an album and and "old". So they won't need a special transfer mechanism - just give me a new copy of whatever is in the old account before deleting it. No new procedure, merely a "sale without the money". If I already had those albums in my own account it is even easier - no change! There is no such thing as "two instances" of the same album on iTunes.
The relatives of the deceased have a wonderful opportunity to learn new things about their dearly departed relative. Things they never would have suspected, when that person was alive! What could possibly go wrong?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Steam is going to hate this. IIRC, Steam does not want accounts to be transferable after death.
So if corporations are people, does this give creditors a legal right to digital assets of companies incorporated in Delaware after bankruptcy?
A "zero-knowledge" service provider (allegedly) has no access to most of the digital assets stored by their service (e.g. LastPass, SpiderOak, etc.). They store encrypted blobs of data on your behalf, and send you these encrypted blobs at your request. Your PC (and not their servers) then decrypts this data using your password (of which the service provider has no knowledge).
I scanned through the bill, and it doesn't seem to acknowledge that such services exist. It doesn't even acknowledge that passwords themselves may not be retrievable, and instead groups passwords into the same category as other "digital assets."
Now IANAL, and it's entirely possible that some other bit of language in the bill or in a service provider's ToS could help to alleviate this, but if I ran such a service, I'd be a bit concerned....
Chances are it was sold to them with a buy button and the description of the product was the product not the licence to the product. Chances are the payment was one time payment for permanent access to the copy. This is the definition of a sale. Calling a sale by another name does not change it from being a sale.
This is the law that really needs to be passed.
I want all of my digital stuff to be destroyed when I die. I really don't want my family combing through all my personal shit when I'm dead.
Since one is merely licensing the content, just license under the family (use Surname as the First name, and Family as the Last name). Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't...
If I want my family to have access to anything online, I will make sure they end up with the password.
As of state authority, online information is not under the control of a state unless the state owns the system, and the state governments are well within their authority to ignore it.
If I run a BBS or a web site in say Ohio, and somebody In Delaware has an account on my system, I'm not giving out the password to somebody just because Delaware says so. I will require a court issued warrant.
Sorry folks, but you will be SOL with me.
This would be the last thing on my mind.